Security Blanket

As you may or may not know, I spend just about every Wednesday at my mother’s house. And last week, we had to go to my old high school to pick up Heinrich from practice, and then shoot on over to bring Caitlyn to the dentist’s office. It was a much busier Wednesday night than usual.

While we were waiting for Heinrich to get out of the school, I was talking to my mom and her fiancé, Chris, about random little things, like we usually do, until we find something that we have to really get into.

I don’t remember necessarily how it even came up, but we started talking about how Heinrich still has this blanket that he’s had since he was a baby, that he called Bankie. It’s a light blue blanket that my mom bought him when she realized that he liked to sit on the floor at the foot of her bed, and basically caress the silk trim of the blanket that she used to have on the bed. Bankie has two different touches: a soft side, and a silk side.

And my brother still uses this blanket to this day. He doesn’t use it when he’s with Dad; but he has it by his side almost whenever he’s just chilling on the couch at Mom’s house. My mom and I don’t really see a problem with this; because Chris wasn’t usually around kids before he was with my mom, he finds it really weird, since Heinrich is a fourteen year old boy.

So this is where our conversation led, and it had me thinking. I don’t really remember having one specific toy or materialistic thing that was my Bankie, and since I had the person who would know the answer to my question in the car with me, I asked.

“Did I, or any of the rest of us, have something like Bankie?”

My mom sat in silence, thinking about it. And she started to list off what she remembered first: Joanne had a pacifier, Rick had his Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle paraphernalia (she said both his TMNT blanket and his action figures, but I feel like your security blanket could really only be one thing, so I don’t really know), and then she said that she remembered a stuffed bear that you could write on—but she didn’t remember who it belonged to.

To my surprise, I actually remembered that one. It was Caitlyn’s.

Mom went on to say how Brianna was basically a huge crybaby, and could never be put down, so I took that as ‘Brianna didn’t cling onto a specific item, but she clinged onto people’. Which kind of backs up my whole story about how Oma used to call her Velcro, when we were little kids.

I was the last she mentioned. You were a happy kid, she said. You just needed to have Barney or Annie or anything Disney-related on the TV, and you’d be satisfied.

Which sounds about right to me. I was a little disappointed that her answer wasn’t a blanket or stuffed animal, but it also made sense to me the things that made me most comfortable were my VHS’s. I still have them to this day, and I refuse to get rid of them. I even had the audacity to ask my Aunt Sue for Nanny’s VHS’s when she started to go through Nan’s stuff, after she passed away. They are safely tucked away in my room, and I probably won’t ever get rid of them.

A part of me likes that my brother still uses Bankie. Sure, it is kind of ridiculous that a fourteen-year-old still clings onto his security blanket. But I want him to cling onto that piece of his childhood for as long as he can, until he finally decides to fold it up and put it on a shelf. There’s no need to rush him into adulthood. So many kids nowadays are forced into growing up earlier than they need to, and I won’t make my little brother be another one of them.

Prompt: Did you have a security blanket or comfort toy when you were little? Tell us about it.